In modern business organizations it is not uncommon for groups of geographically disperse individuals to participate in audio conferences, video conferences, data conferences (e.g., via NetMeeting or WebEx) or some combination thereof. Throughout this disclosure reference to meetings and conferences may be used interchangeably as required by context. Scheduling such conferences/meetings, e.g., coordinating contact times, conference room availability and equipment availability may at times be problematic. Additionally, it is not uncommon for an established meeting to run over by a few minutes or even a significant amount of time. In the prior art, when a scheduled meeting runs over, that meeting may have to be abruptly ended and started again at a future time for completion. This type of rescheduling is inefficient for several reasons because there is an associated “restart” time where attendees of the meeting may have to be reminded of one or more topics previously under discussion. Additionally, the follow up meeting may not be scheduled right away leading to a more significant delay in coming to a resolution for topics under discussion at the meeting. Furthermore, there may have actually been available resources that could have been allocated almost immediately to continue an in-progress meeting.
In the case when meetings are scheduled “back-to-back,” a meeting over-run could impact the participants of the second meeting by causing a delay in their start time. If a third meeting is scheduled behind the second meeting the net result may be that the second meeting cannot utilize resources for the entire scheduled time allotment. If a participant, in the meeting that needs to continue, knows of an available alternate conference room to move to, the overhead of manually “transferring” people and resources to the alternate conference room necessarily has some overhead cost and could be prone to mistakes. For example, if a video conference is being recorded on a recording device the follow on meeting setup may unintentionally forget to initiate a recording resulting in a loss of complete recording. The loss of complete recording may impact scheduled participants who were unable to be in attendance and were relying on catching up via the recording and could similarly impact anyone in the future wanting to replay an archived meeting.
In general, there is a need for a system and method to more efficiently utilize enterprise resources in the event that a scheduled meeting runs over its allotted time. This disclosure presents solutions to these and other problems by presenting, among other things, methods and systems to automatically transfer an in-progress meeting in a variety of ways and by taking into account confidentiality concerns regarding pausing and continuing a meeting in a second location.